Triumph Books Bitcoin and the Future of Money Sep 2014 pdf
Copyright © 2014 by Jose Pagliery
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic,
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Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610.
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Triumph Books LLC
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Printed in U.S.A.
ISBN: 978-1-62937-036-1
Book design by Alex Lubertozzi
Photo of Sapan Shah courtesy of Christa Neu, Lehigh University.
Photo of Josh Arias courtesy of Studio Moirae Photography.
To my wife, Bridget, who inspires me, guides me,
and always shows me there is a kinder, more noble way
We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal
and political freedom has never existed in the past.
—Friedrich Hayek
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Baby Steps
2. The Birth of Bitcoin
3. Bitcoin Explained
4. Using It in Real Life
5. But Is It Money?
6. The Case for Bitcoin
7. The Case against Bitcoin
8. The Rise and Fall of Mt.Gox
9. The Dark Side of Bitcoin
10. How Governments Are Responding
11. Do Androids Dream of Electric Money?
12. Final Thoughts
Appendix
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Notes
Acknowledgments
I AM grateful to those within the Bitcoin community who were willing to share their stories with me.
Remain true to your ideals. They are rooted in a desire for a better, freer world.
To my editor at CNNMoney, David Goldman, thank you for encouraging quality journalism. To
CNNMoney’s executive editor, Lex Haris, thank you for always pushing for clarity in my writing.
And thanks to CNN for approving this. I am indebted to those at Triumph for this opportunity. Thanks
to my friends who reviewed my writing and tested my logic.
I am grateful to my sister and mother for being models of strength. Mike, you pull me up when I
fall. Sam Frade, you are my Doc Brown.
CHAPTER 1
Baby Steps
IT WAS an otherwise quiet news day in February when word got out that the niche online trading site
Mt.Gox (mtgox.com) went offline. The difficulty for me then, as a technology and business reporter at
CNNMoney, was to explain to the average reader how a website that few had ever heard of suddenly
wiped out the savings of people around the globe. The loss totaled nearly $400 million at the time.
And it was all in a currency no one understood, no less.
That was, for many people, the first time they’d heard of Bitcoin. The circumstances were less than
ideal. But the occasion was an appropriate wake-up call.
The world was finally paying attention to the term digital currency. Put simply, it’s electronic
money—nothing more than bits in a computer, be it your laptop, smartphone, or some far-off computer
server in a chilly, climate-controlled data center.
Make no mistake. It’s real money. But it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Although it has similar
properties to the paper bills we all carry in our wallets, a digital currency like Bitcoin is not printed
by a recognized authority like a government that determines how many are put into public circulation.
Nor is it valued in a traditional sense like gold, whose limited supply is slowly extracted from the
earth at great labor and expense.
You can’t feel or touch bitcoins. And it’s precisely that aspect of a digital currency that polarizes
people. Bitcoin’s most idealistic supporters celebrate it as something akin to a monetary messiah, a
means of exchange that will let you buy anything, anytime without nasty roadblocks, like banks or law
enforcement. On the other end of the spectrum are the conservative cynics who think Bitcoin is bogus,
nothing more than a moneymaking house of cards that’s bound to fall as soon as the world wises up to
the fact that zeros and ones on a computer are quite worthless.
They’re both wrong. Bitcoin won’t upend the world’s superpowers—not entirely, anyway. But it’s
already leaving a lasting impact, because it represents a whole new way of thinking about money.
Therein lies Bitcoin’s promise. It has the potential to transform something that’s a pivotal element of
human history—shaking us to our very core.
To understand the significance of something like Bitcoin, it’s worth doing a quick review of
history. While economists and anthropologists disagree about the origin of money, 1 this much is
certain: It’s as old as human civilization. Money had already appeared by the time humans started
jotting down the earliest surviving accounts of their actions in ancient Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE.
At the time, it wasn’t a medium of exchange in the form of gold coins or paper bills, though. It was
merely a ledger of accounts, a running tally of who owes whom. But for all intents and purposes, the
system of debt and credit served as a way to trade.
Some thinkers are inclined to say that money predates even government.2 That’s the argument put
forward by free-market proponents like Adam Smith, widely accepted as the father of capitalism, and
Austrian economist Carl Menger. Before the appearance of money, perhaps we bartered for goods.
But bartering—or the credit system of ancient Mesopotamia—is a terribly inefficient way to trade.
The turning point came around 2000 BCE, when money appeared in a fashion more similar to what
we know today. People in Egypt and Mesopotamia used receipts that showed how much grain they
kept stored in temples. More than a thousand years later, metal coins gained ground in nearby areas. It
eventually became too much of a hassle to lug around heavy sacks of misshapen bronze coins, so
people everywhere opted instead for paper currency that represented value stored elsewhere, such as
a bank. In China, they first appeared with merchants during the Tang Dynasty around 900 CE.3 At
about the same time in the medieval Islamic world, checks and promissory notes gained in popularity.
Europe was the late bloomer, with paper currency making its first appearance in Sweden in 1661.
But that’s just about where the story of monetary innovation ends. Surprising and disappointing,
isn’t it? Since then, governments have strengthened their control over the money-printing process, and
countries continue to struggle with the fact that paper notes have no intrinsic value. This makes them
susceptible to inflation, as occurs when a government prints extra bills to pay off its debts. That
devalues its currency relative to others and impoverishes its people.
Meanwhile, banking has evolved many times over. The concept of a bank as we know it began in
Italy during the Renaissance as a simple provider of bills of exchange, financing trade. Over time,
banking has morphed to include loans, quick transfers of wealth across great distances, as well as a
means of investing and consulting on those very investments. Over the centuries, banking has
squeezed itself into the world of money, in the United States becoming the first and only entity to
receive newly printed government dollars. Banks have placed themselves squarely between the
people who earn money and the governments that issue it. They have made themselves necessary
middlemen.
Indeed, in the modern era, banks have become synonymous with money and necessary for a
prosperous life. Have you ever tried to conduct an expensive transaction without a bank? In most
cases you’ll get rejected or worse—a nasty glare from someone assuming you’re up to no good. Or
have you ever tried to receive steady pay for work in cash? Professionals will most likely receive a
paycheck that needs to be cashed out at a financial institution, and some employers even make direct
bank deposits mandatory. But think about what that does to society at large. It puts banks at the top of
the social pyramid. Even though money is a necessary part of human interaction, something as
ingrained in our consciousness as the rule of law, there exists an entity that retains firm control of it.
They are the gatekeepers. But that need not be the case.
Enter Bitcoin. For the first time in centuries, we’re faced with a new kind of money. Because it
runs on the Internet, this money can be sent across the globe in the blink of an eye with near
anonymity. Anyone can receive it—and spend it—even if they live hundreds of miles away from their
nearest ATM. And because it functions directly between one wallet holder and another, there are no
banks that slow down the transaction process. No fees. No restrictions.
It sounds too good to be true. Or maybe we just forgot how liberating money is supposed to be.
CHAPTER 2
The Birth of Bitcoin
IT ALL started on an obscure online discussion forum dedicated to cryptography. The subject matter
—the art of secure and secret communication—dictated that the regulars were mostly technical
experts in mathematics and engineering. The “low-noise moderated mailing list” on metzdowd.com
served as a de facto academic community, just the right place to introduce an experimental proposal
that was equal parts economics and computer science.
It was Friday, October 31, 2008—Halloween, a day when millions don masks and hide their true
identity. That’s when the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared with a message titled, “Bitcoin
P2P e-cash paper” posted at 2:10 PM (ET):
I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.
The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The nine-page, academic-style document described the fundamental details for a new currency and
the unique, theoretical network to deliver payments. It detailed the complex way transactions would
work, the heightened privacy offered to account holders and how the software would keep people
from double-spending their digital coins.
The essay, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (see Appendix, p. 227), isn’t a walk
in the park to digest. But the introduction lays out a vision that’s easy to grasp: Technological
improvements have outpaced the development of financial networks, and we’ve outgrown the need
for banks in the process. The main gripe for Nakamoto* was that banks have become a third wheel.
They used to speed up transactions, but now they slow them down. As middlemen, banks settle
payment disputes between buyers and sellers. To do that, they must charge fees. With those costs, it’s
not profitable for a bank to process tiny transactions, so we’re limited in the kind of purchases we can
make. Making matters worse, merchants fear customers might try to reverse a purchase, so they raise
their rates too.
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party,” Nakamoto writes.
Nakamoto proposed a digital currency that would live on a network of computers, a well-meaning
community willing to lend their machines’ processing power to keep it alive. Together they would
partake in a system that verifies transactions and “mines” for new bitcoins, producing electronic
tokens at a steady rate. Bitcoin with a capital “B” would be the name of the new system; bitcoin with
a lowercase “b” would mean the units of currency.
The key to the entire system was something called a block chain. This was an innovative approach
that simultaneously verified transactions, kept a log of them, and created new money. Users would
mine for bitcoins by solving puzzles in segments called blocks. Those blocks would house publicly
viewable information about recent transactions. A solved block would produce a unique code, or
hash, that formed the foundation for the next block.
He was immediately peppered with highly technical questions and concerns from others on the
mailing list. Could this system handle many simultaneous transactions? What would keep people from
spending the same coin twice? After all, they’re not physical. Such a blunder would topple the whole
system. And what about nefarious hacker types who hijack whole server farms and turn them into
spam-spewing zombies? Surely a system that lives on a network of volunteers’ computers wouldn’t
stand a chance against that kind of coordinated attack.
Nakamoto’s responses were careful, controlled, and respectful. A novel approach to verifying
transactions would prevent someone from spending the same bitcoin twice, he explained. And the
system, by relying on the combined computing power of lots of users, was designed to withstand any
single attack of that kind.
The responses also revealed a great deal about him. He had a firm grasp of the most fundamental
and often elusive characteristics of money. He was even more familiar with cryptography, having
built the core functions of Bitcoin with the notion that new coins would be produced as computers
solve increasingly difficult puzzles. But first and foremost, Nakamoto was a computer geek.
“I appreciate your questions,” Nakamoto wrote. “I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to
write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the
paper.”
But there was something else. Beneath the highly technical language was a youthful idealism, a
grand vision of what this opaque, unproven project could become. Nakamoto imagined that bitcoins
could one day become popular enough that they would give birth to a new industry, one dedicated
solely to maintaining much of the network and producing new bitcoins. By then, they’d be so
desirable that hackers in control of server farms would rather use those slaves to mine for electronic
money than attack the network or distribute annoying spam. At some point, the network would be
large enough to easily handle the same kind of bandwidth seen by payment networks like Visa,
processing tens of millions of transactions each day.
Above all, though, the system would be liberating. Although all transactions between digital
wallets would be recorded in a public ledger, nameless wallets would allow for enhanced privacy, a
sort of pseudo-anonymity. Without financial institutions taking a cut, it would be easier for people to
make small, casual payments to one another. With a predetermined, controlled growth in the supply of
electronic money built into the software, Bitcoin could avoid runaway inflation. It could become a
go-to currency for people living under a government eager to print money and depreciating its own
currency.
Bitcoin’s rebellious nature and thinly veiled intentions didn’t get lost on one commenter, who told
Nakamoto point blank: “You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.”
“Yes,” Nakamoto replied. “But we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory
of freedom for several years.”
It was typical cypherpunk talk, derived from a school of thought that holds privacy sacred and
personal liberties above everything else. In fact, understanding cypherpunk culture (not to be confused
with cyberpunk, which is more of an art form) is key to appreciating Bitcoin and its enigmatic
founder.
The name says it all. To use a cypher (or spelled correctly, cipher) is to convert information—say,
a message to a friend—from its readable form into something incomprehensible, like a string of
nonsense letters, numbers, and symbols. Using the right formula, you can take that indecipherable text
and change it back into something readable.
It’s quite empowering, when you think about it. The ability to communicate privately opens the
ability to truly express your thoughts, to identify political or societal problems and criticize them
without fear of retribution. That’s particularly true as the Digital Age brings about the Information
Age, when our means of communication via computers and phones have become practically seamless
—as has the capability of governments and powerful corporations to spy on those conversations.
We’re all human, and barring the possibility that those in power are truly benevolent and infallible,
securing our dialogues from prying eyes and ears is vital to maintaining any semblance of democracy
—or any free and fair society.
But only rebels side against the powers that be. The punk part relates to their attitude. Ever since
cypherpunks appeared as highly intelligent, computer-savvy activists in the 1980s, they’ve armed
themselves with cryptography as a means for social change. In many cases, it’s worked and keeps
working. One early figure, John Gilmore, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, known as the
world’s top defender of civil liberties in the digital realm. Another is Philip Zimmermann, creator of
the computer communication encryption method PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is
used by journalists and political dissidents around the globe to hide their communication from
authoritarian governments. Another product of this school of thought is Tor, formerly known as The
Onion Router, a special kind of software developed via funding from the United States Navy
Research Laboratory that lets you surf online anonymously and access otherwise unreachable corners
of the Web. Also among their ranks is Julian Assange, founder of the journalistic outfit WikiLeaks.
Most of these names and groups are familiar to those who pay attention to the tech world. But
outside of that, they’re mostly unknown. People are quick to acquire the latest smartphones, download
the newest apps, and join social media networks, but they don’t pay much attention to the activists
toiling away to protect their privacy on those platforms.
Cypherpunks are insurgents, agitators, digital guerillas. Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin fit right in.
“It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly,” Nakamoto wrote in
a post on November 14, 2008. “I’m better with code than with words though.”
By that point, Nakamoto had been secretly working on his project for a year and a half, according
to his messages to the tiny online community of cryptographers. That’s telling. It would mean that this
individual had started developing the electronic currency in the earliest days of the 2007 financial
crisis.
Let’s do a little time traveling. In the spring of 2007, New Century Financial Corporation, one of
the top financial entities lending to folks with poor credit, collapsed under its own weight. It stopped
accepting loan applications and, weeks later in April, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.1 It
was among the first signs that subprime mortgage lending was doomed.
Then, over the summer, two credit rating agencies placed severe warnings on more than 600 bonds,
because they were backed by subprime mortgages. From its New York headquarters, global
investment bank Bear Stearns liquidated two hedge funds that had bet heavily on those types of loans.
Members of the United States’ central bank, the Federal Reserve, issued a stark warning that
problems in the financial markets threatened the nation’s economic growth. And the problems were
global. In September, the Bank of England got approval to bail out the country’s fifth-largest mortgage
lender, Northern Rock.
The public was waking up to a grotesque reality. The levees guarding an otherwise conservative
financial system had been broken for years, flooding us all with easy money that had been
irresponsibly borrowed, lent, and traded on. Everyone was about to pay dearly for it.
In the United States, two major forces were at play. From one angle, government policies meant to
increase access to loans, and therefore home ownership rates, had backfired. The once restrained
landscape was now a risky one. The federal government had inflated a housing bubble through its
support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two enterprises meant to ease access to home loans. Those
two entities supported a secondary market for mortgages where they could be rounded up together,
packaged, and sold to investors. And by propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with governmentbacked guarantees on loans, the federal authorities had vastly increased the supply of cash available
to make home loans. There was an unintended result, however. To compete with these two entities,
Wall Street banks created riskier types of loans.
From another angle, deregulation during the final years of the Clinton administration paved the way
for banks to run amuck and drag us all down with them. The passage of the 1999 Gramm-LeachBliley Act repealed strict rules put in place after the 1929 stock market crash that led to the decadelong Great Depression. Gone were the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act preventing
everyday commercial banks, the ones holding all our precious home and business loans, from also
becoming risky investment banks and insurance companies. In short time, we were all exposed to the
whims of Wall Street bankers who knowingly traded in what was essentially garbage yet peddled out
to the rest of the world as AAA-rated investments, the highest grade available.
The problem had several layers of complexity and points of failure. But many found the response
by major governments even more appalling. Instead of letting irresponsible players pay the price for
their own mistakes—banks, investors, and borrowers alike—governments moved in to bail them all
out.
In the years since, the American people have had a difficult time accepting the narrative spun by
politicians, central bankers, and their private banking brethren alike—that an economic disaster of
apocalyptic proportions could only be avoided with a collective effort using public funds. And it’s
easy to see why. As government shored back support of schools and community programs, the money
flowed for the very banks that helped put us in this mess in the first place.
We often forget the numbers, because they all came too fast, attached to stories too complex for the
average reader and at a time when people were more focused on saving their mortgages than reading
the newspaper. Here’s a shortlist of the dozen biggest bailouts in the United States, rounded to the
nearest billion, according to public interest news organization ProPublica.2
Entity
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac
American International Group (AIG)
General Motors
Bank of America
Citigroup
JPMorgan Chase
Wells Fargo
GMAC (now Ally Financial)
Chrysler
Goldman Sachs
Morgan Stanley
Total Disbursed
$116 billion
$71 billion
$68 billion
$51 billion
$45 billion
$45 billion
$25 billion
$25 billion
$16 billion
$11 billion
$10 billion
$10 billion
Aside from two car manufacturers that naturally suffered from the fallout of the economic collapse,
every entity on the list is a financial institution.
It was in the midst of this turmoil that Bitcoin was born, just as the failures of the modern banking
system became apparent—as well as widespread disappointment in the politicians who enabled them
and the regulators who failed to catch them. Our reliance on banks, middlemen that hoarded our cash
and invested in risky assets, proved dangerous. And while the mass injection of money via bailouts
and so-called quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve have not resulted in the hyperinflation many
feared, there was a heightened state of distrust between the public and the bureaucrats controlling the
nation’s purse.
Meanwhile, in an unknown corner of the world, someone was developing a system that wouldn’t
have any of these problems. Bitcoin, as Nakamoto explained in the first essay, would be a trustless
system without a need for trusted third parties: financial institutions. The entire thing would live in a
network that is peer-to-peer; that is, it would rely solely on the users themselves. They create the
currency, they transfer it, and they keep it safe.
Safeguards would be built into the software of this computer program. To prevent widespread
fraud stemming from people spending each electronic token twice, each transaction would carry a
unique signature that gets time-stamped on a public ledger. The system would simply reject anyone
trying to spend the same coin a second time. And while the list of transactions would remain public,
people would still maintain relative anonymity, because only their wallet IDs—a long string of
numbers and letters—would appear for all to see.
The network would be powered and regulated by the computers people use to access the system.
Computational power from people’s machines would be used to create new coins by solving intricate
puzzles, and their computers’ processors would also be harnessed to verify transactions in the public
accounting book. In a nod to the lessons of capitalism, the system doesn’t rely on the good nature of
people, but instead on their selfish desires. If you help solve a puzzle and mine a new batch of
bitcoins, you win a sort of lottery and keep your share of the proceeds. These puzzles would form the
backbone to the entire system, because they would regulate how quickly coins could be created. To
keep production steady and prevent inflation in their value, puzzles would increase in difficulty if
computers started solving them too quickly.
This is how Bitcoin would eliminate the need for central banks that control the money supply and
subject the populace to inflation. Gone as well are banks, payment card networks, and financial wire
services, like Western Union, that take a cut of every transaction.
However, banks and credit card payment companies play another role for which people rarely give
them credit. They form a buffer protecting most of us from fraud, siding squarely with consumers
against merchants anytime there’s a disagreement about a transaction. It’s called chargeback, and it’s
the bane of every small business owner in the United States. Say you pulled out your credit card to
purchase a television that never got delivered to your door. Complain to Visa or MasterCard, and
they will immediately revoke the payment. The $500 that was once on its way to the bank accounts
belonging to Big Al’s TV Emporium is suddenly back in your possession. Lone entrepreneur Al
Peabody is suddenly down $500 and has one less television in stock. The delivery service swears it
sent the package, and its ongoing contract protects it from any liability.
Al still has to pay his hourly employees, so that money comes out of the cash flow he uses to
restock the shelves. He hates the situation, but he’s no match for the world’s biggest financial giants.
If he stops accepting credit cards, no one will buy from his shop. So instead, Al starts charging a few
bucks extra on every television to account for the occasional chargeback.
A payment system like Bitcoin, which cuts out trusted third-party banks, has no place for
chargebacks. That’s a big draw for merchants, who can rest assured they will receive payment no
matter what. That says a lot about the system’s philosophy: Personal responsibility is paramount.
There’s no wiggle room for the sorts of shenanigans that thrived during the housing bubble that led to
the 2007 financial collapse.
As Nakamoto wrote early on, “There’s no reliance on recourse. It’s all prevention.”
Eventually, Nakamoto made good on his promise and delivered the actual Bitcoin software on
metzdowd.com’ s cryptography mailing list. Here’s part of the message he posted on Thursday,
January 8, 2009, titled, “Bitcoin vo.1 released.”
Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.
See bitcoin.org for screenshots.
Download link:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar
Windows only for now. Open source C++ code is included.
- Unpack the files into a directory
- Run BITCOIN.EXE
- It automatically connects to other nodes
Evidence would later show Nakamoto had been running it for a few days. The software, Nakamoto
warned, was still “alpha and experimental.” As such, he offered no guarantees the system wouldn’t be
restarted. But he had built the software so that it could be updated and patched as necessary.
The system was designed to produce 21 million bitcoins total—no more, no less. It was a number
he picked at random. At the time in 2009, mining for new bitcoins was the easiest it would ever be.
The puzzles could be solved by the average PC in just a couple of hours. But as people joined the
system, the puzzles would get more difficult and production would decrease over time. By its
creator’s calculations, the amount would be cut in half every four years, with 10.5 million tokens
generated by 2013, another 5.25 million by 2018, then 2.625 million by 2023, and so on.
The electronic money could be sent in two ways. If your intended recipient was online, you could
type in their computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to each device
connected to the net. If they weren’t online at that moment, you could send tokens to their special
Bitcoin address.
It all still sounded like an elaborate game, though. What made them any different from the brass
Chuck E. Cheese play tokens embossed with “In Pizza We Trust?” At least those had a 25¢ play value
you could reliably use at a skeeball machine.
“The real trick will be to get people to actually value the BitCoins [sic] so that they become
currency,” Dustin Trammel, a security researcher in Austin, Texas, said on the forum.
Nakamoto understood the concerns, but he didn’t have a solid answer. After all, the value of
bitcoins wouldn’t be backed by anything tangible, like gold or the credit of a government. “It could
get started in a narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or
micropayments for adult sites,” Nakamoto wrote. “It might make sense just to get some in case it
catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”
But at the time, there wasn’t reason to get hung up on the debate about the actual value of a bitcoin.
The important thing was to introduce something progressive. “I would be surprised if 10 years from
now we’re not using electronic currency in some way.”
With that, Nakamoto left the discussion forum. It was time to shop around his idea.
On February 11, 2009, someone under the name Satoshi Nakamoto became a member at
P2Pfoundation.net, an online community dedicated to peer-to-peer projects. He, she, or they never
bothered to upload an image to his profile, but the person claimed to be a 36-year-old Japanese male.
He hid his IP address and registered under satoshin@gmx.com, the same email used at the
cryptography forum.
That same day, he posted a link to the newly created Bitcoin software program. One account tallied
it at 31,000 lines of code. He had already mined the first batch of bitcoins, and hidden the following
message within the “genesis block” of data:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
It was a reference to a news story that had just graced the Saturday cover of the Times of London—
and a reminder of the very problems Bitcoin was meant to address.
This time around, the description was light on the highly technical talk about cryptography. Instead
it was more tailored to the everyday folks who had recently grown bitter at the world’s bank bailouts.
In this description of the Bitcoin system, Nakamoto showed he had an axe to grind with fiat currency
and fractional reserve banking.
It’s worth taking a short detour to clear up the term fiat and provide a clear picture of how modern
banking actually works. That will help explain Nakamoto’s mission. Most people are under two
major misconceptions about money and banking as they exist today. One is that paper money
represents value stored elsewhere, such as gold in bank vaults. It doesn’t. Money today is fiat money.
These paper bills derive their value from the fact that a government mandates them. The word itself
comes from the Latin term fiat, which roughly translates into the phrase “it shall be.” This kind of
money is desired, not so much because people want it, but because they’re legally required to use it.
And it’s partly driven by fear. If your government forces you to pay taxes with it, you desire that
currency because you don’t want to end up in prison.3
Governments retain more power over their finances with this kind of money, because they can
increase the supply of money at their leisure. Overwhelmed with debt to foreign nations? Just print
more money to pay it off. The negative side effect is that each dollar is then worth less. But there’s
also a major benefit: If there’s outside pressure threatening to wildly change the value of your
country’s dollar, your government is in a better position to counter the damage.
The other way to run things is with a gold standard, something the world loosely relied on for
centuries until the 1970s. In that system, paper actually represents gold stored somewhere. It contrasts
with fiat money in that gold-backed currencies don’t let governments print bills at will without
suffering immediate consequences. However, that system also subjects people to violent changes in
prices as nations trade with one another and their physical stock of gold fluctuates.
The other misconception relates to the way banks work. Many people are under the impression that
a bank takes the money you deposit there and uses it to make loans. Instead, banks make loans with
money they don’t actually have. That might sound confusing, but put bluntly, there’s actually a legally
permissible charade that goes on. It’s called the fractional reserve banking system. In the United
States, the largest banks are allowed to lend out 10 times the amount of money they actually keep in
their vaults. When a bank approves a loan, the money merely blinks into existence on the borrower’s
bank account.4 Doing so, banks essentially create money out of thin air.
The fractional reserve system makes it easier to access loans, because banks don’t have to charge
as much money to be profitable. It also turns banks that would normally be tiny, stingy Scrooges into
massive powerhouses more inclined to give you money. The approach works until everyone asks for
all their money back at once. Then it collapses.
Nakamoto told those at the P2P Foundation’s website that Bitcoin could avoid the pitfalls of
fractional reserve banking and fiat. First, there’d be no banks. And second, Bitcoin wouldn’t be
subject to the whims of central bankers, because new money is produced by software that sticks to a
strict, reliable schedule. Nakamoto was tipping his hat to the approach to money supply voiced by
Nobel Prize-winning American economist Milton Friedman, who suggested replacing the Federal
Reserve with a computer.5
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work,”
Nakamoto wrote. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat
currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it
electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We
have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their
massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.”
That same week, Nakamoto posted a similar message on SourceForge.net, a website where
computer developers could upload free, open-source software for others to download. Archived
numbers there show the growth was slow and steady. In the early days, Bitcoin didn’t exactly go
viral. In the first year or so, the program was downloaded by fewer than 60 people a month.6 But
word got out to key players in the tech space.
Computer programmers and tech-savvy finance experts willing to help advance the project reached
out to Nakamoto. Among the first was Hal Finney, a cypherpunk who was among the first to work on
the PGP encryption method. He helped Nakamoto spot a few bugs in the software and on January 12
received 10 bitcoins (BTC) as a test, thus becoming the first ever recipient of a Bitcoin transaction.7
Others joined in the months that followed.
Mike Hearn, an engineer at Google living in Zurich, Switzerland, extended a willing hand to
Nakamoto in April of that year. A short time later, Jon Matonis, managing director at the electronic
payment consulting company Lydia Group, did the same. In mid-2010, a self-described “code
monkey” living in Amherst, Massachusetts, named Gavin Andresen offered to volunteer his C++
skills to fix any problems in the payment software. Nakamoto communicated with all of them, turning
what was once a secretive venture into a collaborative endeavor involving dozens of technicians
around the world.
All the while, the Bitcoin founder remained elusive and fiercely protective of his identity, dodging
any questions about who he was, where he lived, or what gave him the skills to take on such an
extraordinary undertaking. He never talked by phone. All correspondence was done via email or on
pubic Bitcoin forums.
“I’m very curious to hear more about you,” read Andresen’s first message to Nakamoto. “How old
are you? Is Satoshi your real name? Do you have a day job? What projects have you been involved
with before?”
Nakamoto evaded them all. But he did accept the offer. “Great to have you!” he wrote back.
Over the next year, Andresen and others worked day and night to refine the software’s code. While
the Bitcoin network and its inner workings were nothing short of genius, the execution had its
shortcomings. Parts of the code were sloppy by Andresen’s standards, according to interviews he
gave in later years.8 Even tiny mistakes could have huge consequences.
The first and—as of this writing—only major security flaw ever found in Bitcoin was discovered
in August 2010. 9 Someone had managed to fool the Bitcoin software into producing more than 184
billion BTC in a transaction.10 Nakamoto, computer developer Jeff Garzik, and others raced to
address the problem, purging the transaction from the system’s history and patching the hole.
As time went on, additional developers were brought in to address other issues with the code.
Little by little, Nakamoto transitioned from the face of the project—albeit a masked one—into the
background. By April 2011, he had successfully handed off the keys to Andresen, who in turn led a
handful of other trusted technicians.
In a note to a developer, Nakamoto said he had “moved on to other things” and vanished.11
The next month, the Bitcoin software was downloaded 174,184 times from SourceForge.net.
Another 329,229 did it in the month that followed. The world was catching on.
In those first two and a half years, Bitcoin went from being a completely unknown cryptography
project to a niche online currency. Credit for that transformation belongs to exchanges—online
trading platforms where outsiders unable to successfully mine their own bitcoins could buy them for
cash. The first to open was BitcoinMarket.com in February 2010.12 That was followed in July by
Mt.Gox (mtgox.com), a rebranded site that started out as “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange,” a
hub where fans of the nerdy trading card game could buy and sell their wares.
It was amateur hour. Users frequently complained about scammers, compromised accounts, missed
trades, and halted trading. But at least they could get in on the action. Mt.Gox rose to prominence, and
in the latter half of 2010, the total value of all bitcoins being traded there reached an estimated $1
million.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s popularity reached analysts at the Financial Action Task Force, an
intergovernmental group that keeps a watchful eye on money laundering and terrorist financing
activities. In October 2010, the organization noted the proliferation of digital currencies and warned
about their ability to fuel illicit activities.13 The report’s writers were spot on. Within a few weeks,
the website Silk Road was launched, creating a massive marketplace—running exclusively on Bitcoin
—that functioned as an eBay for drugs.
The buzz around Bitcoin drove a surge in price that reached a notable point in February 2011,
when it reached parity with the U.S. dollar. That caught the attention of Time magazine, which
featured an article explaining how the currency was breaking new ground.14 Major finance companies
Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal had just shut off the flow of money to WikiLeaks, preventing the public
at large from donating to the organization as retribution for its release of damning U.S. State
Department diplomatic cables. But here was Bitcoin, this tiny, unheard-of currency that could
circumvent the world’s financial powerhouses and allow everyone to exercise their First Amendment
rights—with their wallets.
But entering the Bitcoin world and keeping your electronic money safe was no less difficult than
trying to survive a lawless town in a Spaghetti Western. Bad guys were everywhere. It was hard to
tell the businesses from the bandits, especially when it became routine for them to shut their doors,
claim a massive hack, and leave their customers empty-handed. MyBitcoin was among the first
popular transaction processors, because its service was user-friendly. Naturally, it attracted those
newest to the Bitcoin system. But they made for easy prey as well. In the summer of 2011, MyBitcoin
announced it had been hacked, robbed of its 154,406 bitcoins and decided to shut down.15 Their
bitcoins were worth more than $2 million at the time, no small sum. Some customers said they
reported the incident to the FBI, but little came of it. What should they have expected? The head of the
site was a mysterious online persona known only as “Tom Williams.” They had entrusted their
bitcoins to a stranger—even though the system was specifically designed to eliminate third parties.
Slowly but surely, the world of Bitcoin drew in folks from all corners of the world. The first wave
of privacy hawks and cryptography-obsessed mathematicians gave way to a crowd of computer
programmers and Libertarians. Criminals and gold bugs soon followed. When the speculative
investors and venture capitalists jumped in, major media outlets took notice.
Reporters began to ask who created this strange new technology. For journalists in the cross
section between technology and business, finding Satoshi Nakamoto became equivalent to the mad
archeological hunt for the Holy Grail. My favorite attempt came from Joshua Davis, who wrote a
sweeping piece for the New Yorker in October 2011 that vastly narrowed down what kind of person
would fit the description. Nakamoto used flawless English and occasionally used British spelling,
with words like “colour” or “modernised.” He spotted Nakamoto’s reference to the Times of London.
He spoke to Dan Kaminsky, an accomplished and world-renowned computer security researcher,
who sketched this portrait: “Either he’s a team of people who worked on this…or this guy is a
genius.”16 The investigation took him to Crypto 2011, the absolute place to be for a cryptologist like
Nakamoto, as well as those at the U.S. National Security Agency. There, Davis tracked down
Michael Clear, one of the few from the United Kingdom in attendance, one who had graduated as a
top computer science student at Trinity College in Dublin, worked on Allied Irish Banks’ currencytrading software, and was an expert on peer-to-peer technology. Bingo. Clear rose through the ranks
to become Suspect No. 1. Except, that is, for the caveat that the young man denied being Bitcoin’s
father—albeit with dodgy answers and a mischievous tone.
Alas, it wouldn’t end there. The same feat was attempted by journalist Adam Penenberg at Fast
Company, who used circumstantial evidence to point at three men who had filed a patent using an
exact phrase from Nakamoto’s white paper. 17 Information technology pioneer Ted Nelson, after
reading a mystifying profile of Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, identified him as the
guy.18 Vice reporter Alec Liu looped Bitcoin programmer Andresen, the federal government, and a
few others into the mix.19 Several toyed with the idea that Satoshi Nakamoto could be the joint
project of electronics manufacturers SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola.
But none of them were as explosive as the Newsweek cover story in March 2014.20 The current
affairs magazine had been absent from store shelves, and this was its big return to print. The cover
was sexy as hell: a faceless man being unmasked. “The mystery man behind the crypto-currency,” it
promised. And boy, did it deliver a story. Senior staff writer Leah McGrath Goodman’s hypothesis
was poetic in its simplicity: Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a
retired 64-year-old, Japanese-American model train collector in California who had, at one point,
worked on secret projects for the U.S. military. On that fateful Thursday, March 6, reporters from all
over Los Angeles descended on this poor man’s home, demanding to know if he truly was Bitcoin’s
father. He offered a single Associated Press reporter an exclusive interview—to deny everything—
and endured being chased across town by a mad convoy of cars and television trucks.
What got lost in all this frenzy? A small yet compelling detail. Bitcoin was, by design, an opensource project meant to be constantly updated, patched, and maintained by dedicated computer
programmers. By the time journalists were shoving cameras into the face of this bewildered old man,
more than 50 percent of the Bitcoin code had already been rewritten. Some put that figure closer to 70
percent.
Consider what that would have meant to a painting: Sure, some individual or group had stretched
the canvas, sketched the piece, and laid down the oils with a paintbrush. But more than half of it had
been completely reworked, with new layers coating the old ones, giving the work new life and
brilliance.
Bitcoin’s group of core developers made it clear to me how much of Nakamoto’s initial
programming had been reworked. It wasn’t minor. In Garzik’s words: “Satoshi was a brilliant
designer, but not the best software engineer. Satoshi’s code lacked standard software engineering
practices such as a test suite, and was quite disorganized. We have refactored or rewritten a great
deal of source code.”
Bitcoin’s lead developer, Wladimir van der Laan, told me Nakamoto’s “original C++ code was
hard to read and understand, and had quite a few (usually minor) bugs.” It took hundreds if not
thousands of volunteer hours from smart, dedicated computer geeks in love with Bitcoin to make up
for those mistakes. They made it easier to use. And they continue to improve it with every passing
day.
“It indeed doesn’t matter who Satoshi is,” van der Laan wrote to me. “If he/she/they would ever
come back, they will have no special status in the project. By now there may be people that are more
experienced and know more about Bitcoin and the underlying theory than Satoshi himself did. I don’t
claim that I do, though :)”
The project had, in no small sense, outgrown its founder. It belonged to the world now.
* There are many competing theories about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Aside from the usual “Is he Japanese or not?” there’s
also healthy debate about whether it’s a man or a woman. It could be a single person or a group. For brevity and consistency, I’ll abide
by Nakamoto’s own description and simply refer to the mysterious founder as “he.” But I acknowledge it could very well be a trio of
intelligent women at a secretive government agency.
CHAPTER 3
Bitcoin Explained
SO HOW does it actually work? It helps to understand Bitcoin in two very different ways. One is to
skim the surface and see how it mimics the real-life, physical money you already know. Thinking
about it like an electronic coin helps explain how it’s earned, used, and traded. But it’s not exactly
accurate. To truly comprehend Bitcoin, you have to accept what it really is: a network that runs on a
computer program. The whole system is nothing more than ones and zeros stored in computers around
the world. Everything relies on the software operating at the very core of it all: the block chain.
It’s worth issuing a disclaimer: Bitcoin is electronic money, it’s not money stored electronically.
There’s a major difference. Google Wallet, for instance, is a service provided by Google that stores
your credit cards, debit cards, and loyalty cards. It’s a digital wallet that holds on to your traditional
money. But Bitcoin is a totally different approach. It reimagines what money actually is.
You’ll need to get up to speed on a few terms that no sensible person uses in everyday life. They
come from the world of cryptography, a dizzying environment of locks and keys, puzzles and
solutions, secret messages and passcodes that reveal them. Be patient. You won’t need to remember
everything. You can get along fine using bitcoins without memorizing all of it. But it’s worth going
over at least once. In fact, you’ll likely come back to this chapter a few times, and the workings of the
system will dawn on you over time. For me personally, it came in waves.
Let’s start by getting a view of the whole picture. The Bitcoin network consists of computers that
keep up the entire sys
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Book design by Alex Lubertozzi
Photo of Sapan Shah courtesy of Christa Neu, Lehigh University.
Photo of Josh Arias courtesy of Studio Moirae Photography.
To my wife, Bridget, who inspires me, guides me,
and always shows me there is a kinder, more noble way
We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal
and political freedom has never existed in the past.
—Friedrich Hayek
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Baby Steps
2. The Birth of Bitcoin
3. Bitcoin Explained
4. Using It in Real Life
5. But Is It Money?
6. The Case for Bitcoin
7. The Case against Bitcoin
8. The Rise and Fall of Mt.Gox
9. The Dark Side of Bitcoin
10. How Governments Are Responding
11. Do Androids Dream of Electric Money?
12. Final Thoughts
Appendix
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Notes
Acknowledgments
I AM grateful to those within the Bitcoin community who were willing to share their stories with me.
Remain true to your ideals. They are rooted in a desire for a better, freer world.
To my editor at CNNMoney, David Goldman, thank you for encouraging quality journalism. To
CNNMoney’s executive editor, Lex Haris, thank you for always pushing for clarity in my writing.
And thanks to CNN for approving this. I am indebted to those at Triumph for this opportunity. Thanks
to my friends who reviewed my writing and tested my logic.
I am grateful to my sister and mother for being models of strength. Mike, you pull me up when I
fall. Sam Frade, you are my Doc Brown.
CHAPTER 1
Baby Steps
IT WAS an otherwise quiet news day in February when word got out that the niche online trading site
Mt.Gox (mtgox.com) went offline. The difficulty for me then, as a technology and business reporter at
CNNMoney, was to explain to the average reader how a website that few had ever heard of suddenly
wiped out the savings of people around the globe. The loss totaled nearly $400 million at the time.
And it was all in a currency no one understood, no less.
That was, for many people, the first time they’d heard of Bitcoin. The circumstances were less than
ideal. But the occasion was an appropriate wake-up call.
The world was finally paying attention to the term digital currency. Put simply, it’s electronic
money—nothing more than bits in a computer, be it your laptop, smartphone, or some far-off computer
server in a chilly, climate-controlled data center.
Make no mistake. It’s real money. But it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. Although it has similar
properties to the paper bills we all carry in our wallets, a digital currency like Bitcoin is not printed
by a recognized authority like a government that determines how many are put into public circulation.
Nor is it valued in a traditional sense like gold, whose limited supply is slowly extracted from the
earth at great labor and expense.
You can’t feel or touch bitcoins. And it’s precisely that aspect of a digital currency that polarizes
people. Bitcoin’s most idealistic supporters celebrate it as something akin to a monetary messiah, a
means of exchange that will let you buy anything, anytime without nasty roadblocks, like banks or law
enforcement. On the other end of the spectrum are the conservative cynics who think Bitcoin is bogus,
nothing more than a moneymaking house of cards that’s bound to fall as soon as the world wises up to
the fact that zeros and ones on a computer are quite worthless.
They’re both wrong. Bitcoin won’t upend the world’s superpowers—not entirely, anyway. But it’s
already leaving a lasting impact, because it represents a whole new way of thinking about money.
Therein lies Bitcoin’s promise. It has the potential to transform something that’s a pivotal element of
human history—shaking us to our very core.
To understand the significance of something like Bitcoin, it’s worth doing a quick review of
history. While economists and anthropologists disagree about the origin of money, 1 this much is
certain: It’s as old as human civilization. Money had already appeared by the time humans started
jotting down the earliest surviving accounts of their actions in ancient Mesopotamia around 3100 BCE.
At the time, it wasn’t a medium of exchange in the form of gold coins or paper bills, though. It was
merely a ledger of accounts, a running tally of who owes whom. But for all intents and purposes, the
system of debt and credit served as a way to trade.
Some thinkers are inclined to say that money predates even government.2 That’s the argument put
forward by free-market proponents like Adam Smith, widely accepted as the father of capitalism, and
Austrian economist Carl Menger. Before the appearance of money, perhaps we bartered for goods.
But bartering—or the credit system of ancient Mesopotamia—is a terribly inefficient way to trade.
The turning point came around 2000 BCE, when money appeared in a fashion more similar to what
we know today. People in Egypt and Mesopotamia used receipts that showed how much grain they
kept stored in temples. More than a thousand years later, metal coins gained ground in nearby areas. It
eventually became too much of a hassle to lug around heavy sacks of misshapen bronze coins, so
people everywhere opted instead for paper currency that represented value stored elsewhere, such as
a bank. In China, they first appeared with merchants during the Tang Dynasty around 900 CE.3 At
about the same time in the medieval Islamic world, checks and promissory notes gained in popularity.
Europe was the late bloomer, with paper currency making its first appearance in Sweden in 1661.
But that’s just about where the story of monetary innovation ends. Surprising and disappointing,
isn’t it? Since then, governments have strengthened their control over the money-printing process, and
countries continue to struggle with the fact that paper notes have no intrinsic value. This makes them
susceptible to inflation, as occurs when a government prints extra bills to pay off its debts. That
devalues its currency relative to others and impoverishes its people.
Meanwhile, banking has evolved many times over. The concept of a bank as we know it began in
Italy during the Renaissance as a simple provider of bills of exchange, financing trade. Over time,
banking has morphed to include loans, quick transfers of wealth across great distances, as well as a
means of investing and consulting on those very investments. Over the centuries, banking has
squeezed itself into the world of money, in the United States becoming the first and only entity to
receive newly printed government dollars. Banks have placed themselves squarely between the
people who earn money and the governments that issue it. They have made themselves necessary
middlemen.
Indeed, in the modern era, banks have become synonymous with money and necessary for a
prosperous life. Have you ever tried to conduct an expensive transaction without a bank? In most
cases you’ll get rejected or worse—a nasty glare from someone assuming you’re up to no good. Or
have you ever tried to receive steady pay for work in cash? Professionals will most likely receive a
paycheck that needs to be cashed out at a financial institution, and some employers even make direct
bank deposits mandatory. But think about what that does to society at large. It puts banks at the top of
the social pyramid. Even though money is a necessary part of human interaction, something as
ingrained in our consciousness as the rule of law, there exists an entity that retains firm control of it.
They are the gatekeepers. But that need not be the case.
Enter Bitcoin. For the first time in centuries, we’re faced with a new kind of money. Because it
runs on the Internet, this money can be sent across the globe in the blink of an eye with near
anonymity. Anyone can receive it—and spend it—even if they live hundreds of miles away from their
nearest ATM. And because it functions directly between one wallet holder and another, there are no
banks that slow down the transaction process. No fees. No restrictions.
It sounds too good to be true. Or maybe we just forgot how liberating money is supposed to be.
CHAPTER 2
The Birth of Bitcoin
IT ALL started on an obscure online discussion forum dedicated to cryptography. The subject matter
—the art of secure and secret communication—dictated that the regulars were mostly technical
experts in mathematics and engineering. The “low-noise moderated mailing list” on metzdowd.com
served as a de facto academic community, just the right place to introduce an experimental proposal
that was equal parts economics and computer science.
It was Friday, October 31, 2008—Halloween, a day when millions don masks and hide their true
identity. That’s when the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto first appeared with a message titled, “Bitcoin
P2P e-cash paper” posted at 2:10 PM (ET):
I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.
The paper is available at: http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The nine-page, academic-style document described the fundamental details for a new currency and
the unique, theoretical network to deliver payments. It detailed the complex way transactions would
work, the heightened privacy offered to account holders and how the software would keep people
from double-spending their digital coins.
The essay, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (see Appendix, p. 227), isn’t a walk
in the park to digest. But the introduction lays out a vision that’s easy to grasp: Technological
improvements have outpaced the development of financial networks, and we’ve outgrown the need
for banks in the process. The main gripe for Nakamoto* was that banks have become a third wheel.
They used to speed up transactions, but now they slow them down. As middlemen, banks settle
payment disputes between buyers and sellers. To do that, they must charge fees. With those costs, it’s
not profitable for a bank to process tiny transactions, so we’re limited in the kind of purchases we can
make. Making matters worse, merchants fear customers might try to reverse a purchase, so they raise
their rates too.
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,
allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted
third party,” Nakamoto writes.
Nakamoto proposed a digital currency that would live on a network of computers, a well-meaning
community willing to lend their machines’ processing power to keep it alive. Together they would
partake in a system that verifies transactions and “mines” for new bitcoins, producing electronic
tokens at a steady rate. Bitcoin with a capital “B” would be the name of the new system; bitcoin with
a lowercase “b” would mean the units of currency.
The key to the entire system was something called a block chain. This was an innovative approach
that simultaneously verified transactions, kept a log of them, and created new money. Users would
mine for bitcoins by solving puzzles in segments called blocks. Those blocks would house publicly
viewable information about recent transactions. A solved block would produce a unique code, or
hash, that formed the foundation for the next block.
He was immediately peppered with highly technical questions and concerns from others on the
mailing list. Could this system handle many simultaneous transactions? What would keep people from
spending the same coin twice? After all, they’re not physical. Such a blunder would topple the whole
system. And what about nefarious hacker types who hijack whole server farms and turn them into
spam-spewing zombies? Surely a system that lives on a network of volunteers’ computers wouldn’t
stand a chance against that kind of coordinated attack.
Nakamoto’s responses were careful, controlled, and respectful. A novel approach to verifying
transactions would prevent someone from spending the same bitcoin twice, he explained. And the
system, by relying on the combined computing power of lots of users, was designed to withstand any
single attack of that kind.
The responses also revealed a great deal about him. He had a firm grasp of the most fundamental
and often elusive characteristics of money. He was even more familiar with cryptography, having
built the core functions of Bitcoin with the notion that new coins would be produced as computers
solve increasingly difficult puzzles. But first and foremost, Nakamoto was a computer geek.
“I appreciate your questions,” Nakamoto wrote. “I actually did this kind of backwards. I had to
write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the
paper.”
But there was something else. Beneath the highly technical language was a youthful idealism, a
grand vision of what this opaque, unproven project could become. Nakamoto imagined that bitcoins
could one day become popular enough that they would give birth to a new industry, one dedicated
solely to maintaining much of the network and producing new bitcoins. By then, they’d be so
desirable that hackers in control of server farms would rather use those slaves to mine for electronic
money than attack the network or distribute annoying spam. At some point, the network would be
large enough to easily handle the same kind of bandwidth seen by payment networks like Visa,
processing tens of millions of transactions each day.
Above all, though, the system would be liberating. Although all transactions between digital
wallets would be recorded in a public ledger, nameless wallets would allow for enhanced privacy, a
sort of pseudo-anonymity. Without financial institutions taking a cut, it would be easier for people to
make small, casual payments to one another. With a predetermined, controlled growth in the supply of
electronic money built into the software, Bitcoin could avoid runaway inflation. It could become a
go-to currency for people living under a government eager to print money and depreciating its own
currency.
Bitcoin’s rebellious nature and thinly veiled intentions didn’t get lost on one commenter, who told
Nakamoto point blank: “You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography.”
“Yes,” Nakamoto replied. “But we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory
of freedom for several years.”
It was typical cypherpunk talk, derived from a school of thought that holds privacy sacred and
personal liberties above everything else. In fact, understanding cypherpunk culture (not to be confused
with cyberpunk, which is more of an art form) is key to appreciating Bitcoin and its enigmatic
founder.
The name says it all. To use a cypher (or spelled correctly, cipher) is to convert information—say,
a message to a friend—from its readable form into something incomprehensible, like a string of
nonsense letters, numbers, and symbols. Using the right formula, you can take that indecipherable text
and change it back into something readable.
It’s quite empowering, when you think about it. The ability to communicate privately opens the
ability to truly express your thoughts, to identify political or societal problems and criticize them
without fear of retribution. That’s particularly true as the Digital Age brings about the Information
Age, when our means of communication via computers and phones have become practically seamless
—as has the capability of governments and powerful corporations to spy on those conversations.
We’re all human, and barring the possibility that those in power are truly benevolent and infallible,
securing our dialogues from prying eyes and ears is vital to maintaining any semblance of democracy
—or any free and fair society.
But only rebels side against the powers that be. The punk part relates to their attitude. Ever since
cypherpunks appeared as highly intelligent, computer-savvy activists in the 1980s, they’ve armed
themselves with cryptography as a means for social change. In many cases, it’s worked and keeps
working. One early figure, John Gilmore, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, known as the
world’s top defender of civil liberties in the digital realm. Another is Philip Zimmermann, creator of
the computer communication encryption method PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy and is
used by journalists and political dissidents around the globe to hide their communication from
authoritarian governments. Another product of this school of thought is Tor, formerly known as The
Onion Router, a special kind of software developed via funding from the United States Navy
Research Laboratory that lets you surf online anonymously and access otherwise unreachable corners
of the Web. Also among their ranks is Julian Assange, founder of the journalistic outfit WikiLeaks.
Most of these names and groups are familiar to those who pay attention to the tech world. But
outside of that, they’re mostly unknown. People are quick to acquire the latest smartphones, download
the newest apps, and join social media networks, but they don’t pay much attention to the activists
toiling away to protect their privacy on those platforms.
Cypherpunks are insurgents, agitators, digital guerillas. Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin fit right in.
“It’s very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly,” Nakamoto wrote in
a post on November 14, 2008. “I’m better with code than with words though.”
By that point, Nakamoto had been secretly working on his project for a year and a half, according
to his messages to the tiny online community of cryptographers. That’s telling. It would mean that this
individual had started developing the electronic currency in the earliest days of the 2007 financial
crisis.
Let’s do a little time traveling. In the spring of 2007, New Century Financial Corporation, one of
the top financial entities lending to folks with poor credit, collapsed under its own weight. It stopped
accepting loan applications and, weeks later in April, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.1 It
was among the first signs that subprime mortgage lending was doomed.
Then, over the summer, two credit rating agencies placed severe warnings on more than 600 bonds,
because they were backed by subprime mortgages. From its New York headquarters, global
investment bank Bear Stearns liquidated two hedge funds that had bet heavily on those types of loans.
Members of the United States’ central bank, the Federal Reserve, issued a stark warning that
problems in the financial markets threatened the nation’s economic growth. And the problems were
global. In September, the Bank of England got approval to bail out the country’s fifth-largest mortgage
lender, Northern Rock.
The public was waking up to a grotesque reality. The levees guarding an otherwise conservative
financial system had been broken for years, flooding us all with easy money that had been
irresponsibly borrowed, lent, and traded on. Everyone was about to pay dearly for it.
In the United States, two major forces were at play. From one angle, government policies meant to
increase access to loans, and therefore home ownership rates, had backfired. The once restrained
landscape was now a risky one. The federal government had inflated a housing bubble through its
support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two enterprises meant to ease access to home loans. Those
two entities supported a secondary market for mortgages where they could be rounded up together,
packaged, and sold to investors. And by propping up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with governmentbacked guarantees on loans, the federal authorities had vastly increased the supply of cash available
to make home loans. There was an unintended result, however. To compete with these two entities,
Wall Street banks created riskier types of loans.
From another angle, deregulation during the final years of the Clinton administration paved the way
for banks to run amuck and drag us all down with them. The passage of the 1999 Gramm-LeachBliley Act repealed strict rules put in place after the 1929 stock market crash that led to the decadelong Great Depression. Gone were the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act preventing
everyday commercial banks, the ones holding all our precious home and business loans, from also
becoming risky investment banks and insurance companies. In short time, we were all exposed to the
whims of Wall Street bankers who knowingly traded in what was essentially garbage yet peddled out
to the rest of the world as AAA-rated investments, the highest grade available.
The problem had several layers of complexity and points of failure. But many found the response
by major governments even more appalling. Instead of letting irresponsible players pay the price for
their own mistakes—banks, investors, and borrowers alike—governments moved in to bail them all
out.
In the years since, the American people have had a difficult time accepting the narrative spun by
politicians, central bankers, and their private banking brethren alike—that an economic disaster of
apocalyptic proportions could only be avoided with a collective effort using public funds. And it’s
easy to see why. As government shored back support of schools and community programs, the money
flowed for the very banks that helped put us in this mess in the first place.
We often forget the numbers, because they all came too fast, attached to stories too complex for the
average reader and at a time when people were more focused on saving their mortgages than reading
the newspaper. Here’s a shortlist of the dozen biggest bailouts in the United States, rounded to the
nearest billion, according to public interest news organization ProPublica.2
Entity
Fannie Mae
Freddie Mac
American International Group (AIG)
General Motors
Bank of America
Citigroup
JPMorgan Chase
Wells Fargo
GMAC (now Ally Financial)
Chrysler
Goldman Sachs
Morgan Stanley
Total Disbursed
$116 billion
$71 billion
$68 billion
$51 billion
$45 billion
$45 billion
$25 billion
$25 billion
$16 billion
$11 billion
$10 billion
$10 billion
Aside from two car manufacturers that naturally suffered from the fallout of the economic collapse,
every entity on the list is a financial institution.
It was in the midst of this turmoil that Bitcoin was born, just as the failures of the modern banking
system became apparent—as well as widespread disappointment in the politicians who enabled them
and the regulators who failed to catch them. Our reliance on banks, middlemen that hoarded our cash
and invested in risky assets, proved dangerous. And while the mass injection of money via bailouts
and so-called quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve have not resulted in the hyperinflation many
feared, there was a heightened state of distrust between the public and the bureaucrats controlling the
nation’s purse.
Meanwhile, in an unknown corner of the world, someone was developing a system that wouldn’t
have any of these problems. Bitcoin, as Nakamoto explained in the first essay, would be a trustless
system without a need for trusted third parties: financial institutions. The entire thing would live in a
network that is peer-to-peer; that is, it would rely solely on the users themselves. They create the
currency, they transfer it, and they keep it safe.
Safeguards would be built into the software of this computer program. To prevent widespread
fraud stemming from people spending each electronic token twice, each transaction would carry a
unique signature that gets time-stamped on a public ledger. The system would simply reject anyone
trying to spend the same coin a second time. And while the list of transactions would remain public,
people would still maintain relative anonymity, because only their wallet IDs—a long string of
numbers and letters—would appear for all to see.
The network would be powered and regulated by the computers people use to access the system.
Computational power from people’s machines would be used to create new coins by solving intricate
puzzles, and their computers’ processors would also be harnessed to verify transactions in the public
accounting book. In a nod to the lessons of capitalism, the system doesn’t rely on the good nature of
people, but instead on their selfish desires. If you help solve a puzzle and mine a new batch of
bitcoins, you win a sort of lottery and keep your share of the proceeds. These puzzles would form the
backbone to the entire system, because they would regulate how quickly coins could be created. To
keep production steady and prevent inflation in their value, puzzles would increase in difficulty if
computers started solving them too quickly.
This is how Bitcoin would eliminate the need for central banks that control the money supply and
subject the populace to inflation. Gone as well are banks, payment card networks, and financial wire
services, like Western Union, that take a cut of every transaction.
However, banks and credit card payment companies play another role for which people rarely give
them credit. They form a buffer protecting most of us from fraud, siding squarely with consumers
against merchants anytime there’s a disagreement about a transaction. It’s called chargeback, and it’s
the bane of every small business owner in the United States. Say you pulled out your credit card to
purchase a television that never got delivered to your door. Complain to Visa or MasterCard, and
they will immediately revoke the payment. The $500 that was once on its way to the bank accounts
belonging to Big Al’s TV Emporium is suddenly back in your possession. Lone entrepreneur Al
Peabody is suddenly down $500 and has one less television in stock. The delivery service swears it
sent the package, and its ongoing contract protects it from any liability.
Al still has to pay his hourly employees, so that money comes out of the cash flow he uses to
restock the shelves. He hates the situation, but he’s no match for the world’s biggest financial giants.
If he stops accepting credit cards, no one will buy from his shop. So instead, Al starts charging a few
bucks extra on every television to account for the occasional chargeback.
A payment system like Bitcoin, which cuts out trusted third-party banks, has no place for
chargebacks. That’s a big draw for merchants, who can rest assured they will receive payment no
matter what. That says a lot about the system’s philosophy: Personal responsibility is paramount.
There’s no wiggle room for the sorts of shenanigans that thrived during the housing bubble that led to
the 2007 financial collapse.
As Nakamoto wrote early on, “There’s no reliance on recourse. It’s all prevention.”
Eventually, Nakamoto made good on his promise and delivered the actual Bitcoin software on
metzdowd.com’ s cryptography mailing list. Here’s part of the message he posted on Thursday,
January 8, 2009, titled, “Bitcoin vo.1 released.”
Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
It’s completely decentralized with no server or central authority.
See bitcoin.org for screenshots.
Download link:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar
Windows only for now. Open source C++ code is included.
- Unpack the files into a directory
- Run BITCOIN.EXE
- It automatically connects to other nodes
Evidence would later show Nakamoto had been running it for a few days. The software, Nakamoto
warned, was still “alpha and experimental.” As such, he offered no guarantees the system wouldn’t be
restarted. But he had built the software so that it could be updated and patched as necessary.
The system was designed to produce 21 million bitcoins total—no more, no less. It was a number
he picked at random. At the time in 2009, mining for new bitcoins was the easiest it would ever be.
The puzzles could be solved by the average PC in just a couple of hours. But as people joined the
system, the puzzles would get more difficult and production would decrease over time. By its
creator’s calculations, the amount would be cut in half every four years, with 10.5 million tokens
generated by 2013, another 5.25 million by 2018, then 2.625 million by 2023, and so on.
The electronic money could be sent in two ways. If your intended recipient was online, you could
type in their computer’s Internet Protocol (IP) address, the unique number assigned to each device
connected to the net. If they weren’t online at that moment, you could send tokens to their special
Bitcoin address.
It all still sounded like an elaborate game, though. What made them any different from the brass
Chuck E. Cheese play tokens embossed with “In Pizza We Trust?” At least those had a 25¢ play value
you could reliably use at a skeeball machine.
“The real trick will be to get people to actually value the BitCoins [sic] so that they become
currency,” Dustin Trammel, a security researcher in Austin, Texas, said on the forum.
Nakamoto understood the concerns, but he didn’t have a solid answer. After all, the value of
bitcoins wouldn’t be backed by anything tangible, like gold or the credit of a government. “It could
get started in a narrow niche like reward points, donation tokens, currency for a game or
micropayments for adult sites,” Nakamoto wrote. “It might make sense just to get some in case it
catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.”
But at the time, there wasn’t reason to get hung up on the debate about the actual value of a bitcoin.
The important thing was to introduce something progressive. “I would be surprised if 10 years from
now we’re not using electronic currency in some way.”
With that, Nakamoto left the discussion forum. It was time to shop around his idea.
On February 11, 2009, someone under the name Satoshi Nakamoto became a member at
P2Pfoundation.net, an online community dedicated to peer-to-peer projects. He, she, or they never
bothered to upload an image to his profile, but the person claimed to be a 36-year-old Japanese male.
He hid his IP address and registered under satoshin@gmx.com, the same email used at the
cryptography forum.
That same day, he posted a link to the newly created Bitcoin software program. One account tallied
it at 31,000 lines of code. He had already mined the first batch of bitcoins, and hidden the following
message within the “genesis block” of data:
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
It was a reference to a news story that had just graced the Saturday cover of the Times of London—
and a reminder of the very problems Bitcoin was meant to address.
This time around, the description was light on the highly technical talk about cryptography. Instead
it was more tailored to the everyday folks who had recently grown bitter at the world’s bank bailouts.
In this description of the Bitcoin system, Nakamoto showed he had an axe to grind with fiat currency
and fractional reserve banking.
It’s worth taking a short detour to clear up the term fiat and provide a clear picture of how modern
banking actually works. That will help explain Nakamoto’s mission. Most people are under two
major misconceptions about money and banking as they exist today. One is that paper money
represents value stored elsewhere, such as gold in bank vaults. It doesn’t. Money today is fiat money.
These paper bills derive their value from the fact that a government mandates them. The word itself
comes from the Latin term fiat, which roughly translates into the phrase “it shall be.” This kind of
money is desired, not so much because people want it, but because they’re legally required to use it.
And it’s partly driven by fear. If your government forces you to pay taxes with it, you desire that
currency because you don’t want to end up in prison.3
Governments retain more power over their finances with this kind of money, because they can
increase the supply of money at their leisure. Overwhelmed with debt to foreign nations? Just print
more money to pay it off. The negative side effect is that each dollar is then worth less. But there’s
also a major benefit: If there’s outside pressure threatening to wildly change the value of your
country’s dollar, your government is in a better position to counter the damage.
The other way to run things is with a gold standard, something the world loosely relied on for
centuries until the 1970s. In that system, paper actually represents gold stored somewhere. It contrasts
with fiat money in that gold-backed currencies don’t let governments print bills at will without
suffering immediate consequences. However, that system also subjects people to violent changes in
prices as nations trade with one another and their physical stock of gold fluctuates.
The other misconception relates to the way banks work. Many people are under the impression that
a bank takes the money you deposit there and uses it to make loans. Instead, banks make loans with
money they don’t actually have. That might sound confusing, but put bluntly, there’s actually a legally
permissible charade that goes on. It’s called the fractional reserve banking system. In the United
States, the largest banks are allowed to lend out 10 times the amount of money they actually keep in
their vaults. When a bank approves a loan, the money merely blinks into existence on the borrower’s
bank account.4 Doing so, banks essentially create money out of thin air.
The fractional reserve system makes it easier to access loans, because banks don’t have to charge
as much money to be profitable. It also turns banks that would normally be tiny, stingy Scrooges into
massive powerhouses more inclined to give you money. The approach works until everyone asks for
all their money back at once. Then it collapses.
Nakamoto told those at the P2P Foundation’s website that Bitcoin could avoid the pitfalls of
fractional reserve banking and fiat. First, there’d be no banks. And second, Bitcoin wouldn’t be
subject to the whims of central bankers, because new money is produced by software that sticks to a
strict, reliable schedule. Nakamoto was tipping his hat to the approach to money supply voiced by
Nobel Prize-winning American economist Milton Friedman, who suggested replacing the Federal
Reserve with a computer.5
“The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work,”
Nakamoto wrote. “The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat
currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it
electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We
have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their
massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.”
That same week, Nakamoto posted a similar message on SourceForge.net, a website where
computer developers could upload free, open-source software for others to download. Archived
numbers there show the growth was slow and steady. In the early days, Bitcoin didn’t exactly go
viral. In the first year or so, the program was downloaded by fewer than 60 people a month.6 But
word got out to key players in the tech space.
Computer programmers and tech-savvy finance experts willing to help advance the project reached
out to Nakamoto. Among the first was Hal Finney, a cypherpunk who was among the first to work on
the PGP encryption method. He helped Nakamoto spot a few bugs in the software and on January 12
received 10 bitcoins (BTC) as a test, thus becoming the first ever recipient of a Bitcoin transaction.7
Others joined in the months that followed.
Mike Hearn, an engineer at Google living in Zurich, Switzerland, extended a willing hand to
Nakamoto in April of that year. A short time later, Jon Matonis, managing director at the electronic
payment consulting company Lydia Group, did the same. In mid-2010, a self-described “code
monkey” living in Amherst, Massachusetts, named Gavin Andresen offered to volunteer his C++
skills to fix any problems in the payment software. Nakamoto communicated with all of them, turning
what was once a secretive venture into a collaborative endeavor involving dozens of technicians
around the world.
All the while, the Bitcoin founder remained elusive and fiercely protective of his identity, dodging
any questions about who he was, where he lived, or what gave him the skills to take on such an
extraordinary undertaking. He never talked by phone. All correspondence was done via email or on
pubic Bitcoin forums.
“I’m very curious to hear more about you,” read Andresen’s first message to Nakamoto. “How old
are you? Is Satoshi your real name? Do you have a day job? What projects have you been involved
with before?”
Nakamoto evaded them all. But he did accept the offer. “Great to have you!” he wrote back.
Over the next year, Andresen and others worked day and night to refine the software’s code. While
the Bitcoin network and its inner workings were nothing short of genius, the execution had its
shortcomings. Parts of the code were sloppy by Andresen’s standards, according to interviews he
gave in later years.8 Even tiny mistakes could have huge consequences.
The first and—as of this writing—only major security flaw ever found in Bitcoin was discovered
in August 2010. 9 Someone had managed to fool the Bitcoin software into producing more than 184
billion BTC in a transaction.10 Nakamoto, computer developer Jeff Garzik, and others raced to
address the problem, purging the transaction from the system’s history and patching the hole.
As time went on, additional developers were brought in to address other issues with the code.
Little by little, Nakamoto transitioned from the face of the project—albeit a masked one—into the
background. By April 2011, he had successfully handed off the keys to Andresen, who in turn led a
handful of other trusted technicians.
In a note to a developer, Nakamoto said he had “moved on to other things” and vanished.11
The next month, the Bitcoin software was downloaded 174,184 times from SourceForge.net.
Another 329,229 did it in the month that followed. The world was catching on.
In those first two and a half years, Bitcoin went from being a completely unknown cryptography
project to a niche online currency. Credit for that transformation belongs to exchanges—online
trading platforms where outsiders unable to successfully mine their own bitcoins could buy them for
cash. The first to open was BitcoinMarket.com in February 2010.12 That was followed in July by
Mt.Gox (mtgox.com), a rebranded site that started out as “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange,” a
hub where fans of the nerdy trading card game could buy and sell their wares.
It was amateur hour. Users frequently complained about scammers, compromised accounts, missed
trades, and halted trading. But at least they could get in on the action. Mt.Gox rose to prominence, and
in the latter half of 2010, the total value of all bitcoins being traded there reached an estimated $1
million.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s popularity reached analysts at the Financial Action Task Force, an
intergovernmental group that keeps a watchful eye on money laundering and terrorist financing
activities. In October 2010, the organization noted the proliferation of digital currencies and warned
about their ability to fuel illicit activities.13 The report’s writers were spot on. Within a few weeks,
the website Silk Road was launched, creating a massive marketplace—running exclusively on Bitcoin
—that functioned as an eBay for drugs.
The buzz around Bitcoin drove a surge in price that reached a notable point in February 2011,
when it reached parity with the U.S. dollar. That caught the attention of Time magazine, which
featured an article explaining how the currency was breaking new ground.14 Major finance companies
Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal had just shut off the flow of money to WikiLeaks, preventing the public
at large from donating to the organization as retribution for its release of damning U.S. State
Department diplomatic cables. But here was Bitcoin, this tiny, unheard-of currency that could
circumvent the world’s financial powerhouses and allow everyone to exercise their First Amendment
rights—with their wallets.
But entering the Bitcoin world and keeping your electronic money safe was no less difficult than
trying to survive a lawless town in a Spaghetti Western. Bad guys were everywhere. It was hard to
tell the businesses from the bandits, especially when it became routine for them to shut their doors,
claim a massive hack, and leave their customers empty-handed. MyBitcoin was among the first
popular transaction processors, because its service was user-friendly. Naturally, it attracted those
newest to the Bitcoin system. But they made for easy prey as well. In the summer of 2011, MyBitcoin
announced it had been hacked, robbed of its 154,406 bitcoins and decided to shut down.15 Their
bitcoins were worth more than $2 million at the time, no small sum. Some customers said they
reported the incident to the FBI, but little came of it. What should they have expected? The head of the
site was a mysterious online persona known only as “Tom Williams.” They had entrusted their
bitcoins to a stranger—even though the system was specifically designed to eliminate third parties.
Slowly but surely, the world of Bitcoin drew in folks from all corners of the world. The first wave
of privacy hawks and cryptography-obsessed mathematicians gave way to a crowd of computer
programmers and Libertarians. Criminals and gold bugs soon followed. When the speculative
investors and venture capitalists jumped in, major media outlets took notice.
Reporters began to ask who created this strange new technology. For journalists in the cross
section between technology and business, finding Satoshi Nakamoto became equivalent to the mad
archeological hunt for the Holy Grail. My favorite attempt came from Joshua Davis, who wrote a
sweeping piece for the New Yorker in October 2011 that vastly narrowed down what kind of person
would fit the description. Nakamoto used flawless English and occasionally used British spelling,
with words like “colour” or “modernised.” He spotted Nakamoto’s reference to the Times of London.
He spoke to Dan Kaminsky, an accomplished and world-renowned computer security researcher,
who sketched this portrait: “Either he’s a team of people who worked on this…or this guy is a
genius.”16 The investigation took him to Crypto 2011, the absolute place to be for a cryptologist like
Nakamoto, as well as those at the U.S. National Security Agency. There, Davis tracked down
Michael Clear, one of the few from the United Kingdom in attendance, one who had graduated as a
top computer science student at Trinity College in Dublin, worked on Allied Irish Banks’ currencytrading software, and was an expert on peer-to-peer technology. Bingo. Clear rose through the ranks
to become Suspect No. 1. Except, that is, for the caveat that the young man denied being Bitcoin’s
father—albeit with dodgy answers and a mischievous tone.
Alas, it wouldn’t end there. The same feat was attempted by journalist Adam Penenberg at Fast
Company, who used circumstantial evidence to point at three men who had filed a patent using an
exact phrase from Nakamoto’s white paper. 17 Information technology pioneer Ted Nelson, after
reading a mystifying profile of Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, identified him as the
guy.18 Vice reporter Alec Liu looped Bitcoin programmer Andresen, the federal government, and a
few others into the mix.19 Several toyed with the idea that Satoshi Nakamoto could be the joint
project of electronics manufacturers SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola.
But none of them were as explosive as the Newsweek cover story in March 2014.20 The current
affairs magazine had been absent from store shelves, and this was its big return to print. The cover
was sexy as hell: a faceless man being unmasked. “The mystery man behind the crypto-currency,” it
promised. And boy, did it deliver a story. Senior staff writer Leah McGrath Goodman’s hypothesis
was poetic in its simplicity: Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a
retired 64-year-old, Japanese-American model train collector in California who had, at one point,
worked on secret projects for the U.S. military. On that fateful Thursday, March 6, reporters from all
over Los Angeles descended on this poor man’s home, demanding to know if he truly was Bitcoin’s
father. He offered a single Associated Press reporter an exclusive interview—to deny everything—
and endured being chased across town by a mad convoy of cars and television trucks.
What got lost in all this frenzy? A small yet compelling detail. Bitcoin was, by design, an opensource project meant to be constantly updated, patched, and maintained by dedicated computer
programmers. By the time journalists were shoving cameras into the face of this bewildered old man,
more than 50 percent of the Bitcoin code had already been rewritten. Some put that figure closer to 70
percent.
Consider what that would have meant to a painting: Sure, some individual or group had stretched
the canvas, sketched the piece, and laid down the oils with a paintbrush. But more than half of it had
been completely reworked, with new layers coating the old ones, giving the work new life and
brilliance.
Bitcoin’s group of core developers made it clear to me how much of Nakamoto’s initial
programming had been reworked. It wasn’t minor. In Garzik’s words: “Satoshi was a brilliant
designer, but not the best software engineer. Satoshi’s code lacked standard software engineering
practices such as a test suite, and was quite disorganized. We have refactored or rewritten a great
deal of source code.”
Bitcoin’s lead developer, Wladimir van der Laan, told me Nakamoto’s “original C++ code was
hard to read and understand, and had quite a few (usually minor) bugs.” It took hundreds if not
thousands of volunteer hours from smart, dedicated computer geeks in love with Bitcoin to make up
for those mistakes. They made it easier to use. And they continue to improve it with every passing
day.
“It indeed doesn’t matter who Satoshi is,” van der Laan wrote to me. “If he/she/they would ever
come back, they will have no special status in the project. By now there may be people that are more
experienced and know more about Bitcoin and the underlying theory than Satoshi himself did. I don’t
claim that I do, though :)”
The project had, in no small sense, outgrown its founder. It belonged to the world now.
* There are many competing theories about the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Aside from the usual “Is he Japanese or not?” there’s
also healthy debate about whether it’s a man or a woman. It could be a single person or a group. For brevity and consistency, I’ll abide
by Nakamoto’s own description and simply refer to the mysterious founder as “he.” But I acknowledge it could very well be a trio of
intelligent women at a secretive government agency.
CHAPTER 3
Bitcoin Explained
SO HOW does it actually work? It helps to understand Bitcoin in two very different ways. One is to
skim the surface and see how it mimics the real-life, physical money you already know. Thinking
about it like an electronic coin helps explain how it’s earned, used, and traded. But it’s not exactly
accurate. To truly comprehend Bitcoin, you have to accept what it really is: a network that runs on a
computer program. The whole system is nothing more than ones and zeros stored in computers around
the world. Everything relies on the software operating at the very core of it all: the block chain.
It’s worth issuing a disclaimer: Bitcoin is electronic money, it’s not money stored electronically.
There’s a major difference. Google Wallet, for instance, is a service provided by Google that stores
your credit cards, debit cards, and loyalty cards. It’s a digital wallet that holds on to your traditional
money. But Bitcoin is a totally different approach. It reimagines what money actually is.
You’ll need to get up to speed on a few terms that no sensible person uses in everyday life. They
come from the world of cryptography, a dizzying environment of locks and keys, puzzles and
solutions, secret messages and passcodes that reveal them. Be patient. You won’t need to remember
everything. You can get along fine using bitcoins without memorizing all of it. But it’s worth going
over at least once. In fact, you’ll likely come back to this chapter a few times, and the workings of the
system will dawn on you over time. For me personally, it came in waves.
Let’s start by getting a view of the whole picture. The Bitcoin network consists of computers that
keep up the entire sys